"Listen to me carefully," he said. "Not as an argument. As a warning, offered plainly. If you continue this, there will be consequences neither of us can call back. Not threats. Consequences. The kind that follow a man through reports and hearings and the rest of his working life. Stop now, check my identification, and we can still describe this morning as a mistake that was corrected."
Brandt laughed, a short sound with no humor in it. "There it is. I was waiting for it. Everybody is somebody when the cuffs go on. Everybody knows a lawyer, knows a chief, knows a judge. You are not special, and you are not scaring me in my own park."
"It is not your park," Ellery said. "And it is not mine either. It belongs to the families who bring their children here, which is why I came. Check the pocket, Officer. Please. That is all I am asking."
"Walk." Brandt pulled him away from the fence by the chain of the cuffs, jerking him off balance. "We are done talking by the fence. You are going to the car, and then you are going downtown, and downtown can sort out your stories."
Ellery stumbled a step on the gravel and recovered, turning his feet carefully so he would not fall with his hands locked behind him. He kept his knees soft and his eyes forward.
"I am walking," he said. "You do not need to pull. I will walk at whatever pace you set."
They had gone perhaps six steps toward the cruiser, which sat at the curb with its lights turning in silence, when Ellery tried once more to slow the morning down. "My name is Micah —"
The punch cut the sentence in half.
Brandt drove his fist into Ellery's stomach, hard and low, without warning and without any movement from Ellery to provoke it beyond speech. The air left Ellery's body in a single forced rush. He folded at the waist as far as the cuffs allowed, which was not far, and pain spread outward from the center of him in a hot, nauseating bloom. His knees buckled. Gravel shifted under his shoes.
For several seconds he could not speak at all. He could only breathe in shallow, ragged pulls and stare at the ground, at small gray stones and a bottle cap and the toe of Brandt's boot, while his body decided whether it would be sick.
"That," Brandt said above him, breathing hard, "is what resisting gets you."
Ellery forced his head up. His eyes were watering, but his voice, when it came, was steadier than he felt. "I did not resist. I was speaking. You struck a handcuffed man for speaking. Remember that you chose that. Nobody made that choice for you."
"Get up."
"I am trying." Ellery got one foot under him, then the other. His stomach cramped in protest. The cuffs tore at his wrists as his weight shifted. "Give me a moment to stand without falling."
"You had your moments. You used them all talking." Brandt seized his upper arm and hauled him upright with a force that wrenched his shoulder, then shoved him forward toward the cruiser. "Move. If you fall again, I will write that down as refusing to walk."
Ellery moved. Each step sent a dull echo through his midsection. He thought about the parents who had written to his office about a rusted chain, and how harm rarely announced itself in advance. It arrived, usually, as someone deciding a small cruelty did not count.
At the cruiser Brandt opened the rear door and put a heavy hand on top of Ellery's head, a gesture that might have looked protective to anyone watching from a distance. It was not protective. He pushed down too late and guided badly, and the side of Ellery's head struck the roofline with a hollow, metallic sound that rang inside his skull. A bright point of pain opened above his temple.
Ellery went still. "You hit my head on the car," he said, very quietly.
"You ducked wrong."
"I did not duck at all. Your hand was on my head. The direction was yours."
"Get in." Brandt pushed him down onto the seat, legs still half outside until Ellery worked them in himself, inch by inch, careful of his stomach, careful of his head. The door slammed. Through the glass, the park looked distant already: the swings, the fence, the slide with its crack like a thin white river.
Ellery leaned his shoulder against the seat, breathing through the pain, and fixed the order of events in his mind again: fence, cuffs, warning, fist, gravel, roofline. Whatever Brandt wrote later, Ellery would know what the morning had actually contained, step by step.
Chapter 8: John Doe
Brandt stood outside the cruiser with the door shut between them and took a moment to compose himself, as if he could arrange the morning into a better shape by breathing before he spoke into the radio.